Here is the first clear picture of Radeon HD 7970 engineering sample PCB. The final product will feature an all-black PCB color. The picture reveals the PCB to have provision for two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, though on this sample, there are two 6-pin connectors. We've seen other samples using 8 + 6 pin connector arrangements. Unlike earlier thought, the HD 7900 single-GPU reference board very much does use a digital-PWM power design. There appears to be CPL-made single-phase PWM chokes, and Volterra-made regulators. Not all power domains, though, seem to have digital-PWM. We can find a 5+1+1 phase VRM, with some miscellaneous analog power domains.

The GPU package design is nothing like we've seen from AMD. It looks to be slightly larger than that of AMD Cayman. The die is oriented diagonally, with a sturdy brace around it reduce and stabilize the pressure applied by the cooling assembly. There are twelve memory chips around the GPU, as this chip features a 384-bit wide memory interface, to deliver nearly 50% higher memory bandwidth over the previous generation. The card features redundant BIOS, loaded into two separate EEPROM chips that can be toggled using a small 2-way switch located next to the Crossfire connectors. Display connectors include one DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DP connectors. The second picture below reveals a curvy back-side of the cooling assembly. A nice aesthetic touch with zero function.

You see EVGA doing holes on their backplates and only doing thermal pads right around the core, couldn't you just get an ek plate and cover the whole back of the card with thermal padding to get the same or better cooling? I don't think backplate has to equal heat-trap.

Yes, they do. You buy a product with performance provided by current drivers. No one is ever going to promise you that you'll see gains with future drivers, especially that GCN should not suffer from utilisation issues as VLIW 4/5 did.

How long are you willing to wait for the driver you're speaking of? 1 month, 2 months? Till the next generation? It makes perfect sense to me to take the performance as it is right now and hope (just hope, not wait) to see better performance at a later point.

Can't wait to get rid of my two 6990 ovens...
I don't like that they cheaped out on the VRMs though, let's hope that this new power circuitry doesn't mess with overclocking. Obviously no memory dedicated overvoltage on reference right?